A collating symbol is a collating element enclosed within bracket-period ( "[." and ".]" ) delimiters. Collating elements are defined as described in Collation Order . Conforming applications shall represent multi-character collating elements as collating symbols when it is necessary to distinguish them from a list of the individual characters that make up the multi-character collating element. For example, if the string "ch" is a collating element defined using the line:

collating-element from ""

in the locale definition, the expression "[[.ch.]]" shall be treated as an RE containing the collating symbol 'ch' , while "[ch]" shall be treated as an RE matching 'c' or 'h' . Collating symbols are recognized only inside bracket expressions. If the string is not a collating element in the current locale, the expression is invalid.

A collating symbol is a collating element enclosed within bracket-period ( "[." and ".]" ) delimiters. Collating elements are defined as described in Collation Order . Conforming applications shall represent multi-character collating elements as collating symbols when it is necessary to distinguish them from a list of the individual characters that make up the multi-character collating element. For example, if the string "ch" is a collating element defined using the line:

collating-element <ch-digraph> from "<c><h>"

in the locale definition, the expression "[[.ch.]]" shall be treated as an RE containing the collating symbol 'ch' , while "[ch]" shall be treated as an RE matching 'c' or 'h' . Collating symbols are recognized only inside bracket expressions. If the string is not a collating element in the current locale, the expression is invalid.